Research

Working papers

Voting Rationales

 (with Roni Michaely and Irene Yi)

Charles River Associates Award for the Best Paper on Corporate Finance at the 2025 Western Finance Association Meeting 

Best Conference Papers Award at The Mediterranean Accounting Conference (TMAC) 2025 

Using a novel dataset where institutional investors explain their votes—voting rationales—we provide direct evidence on the motivations behind votes in director elections. Lack of independence and board diversity are top reasons for opposing directors. These rationales accurately reflect firms’ real weaknesses rather than investors’ rationale-washing. Subsequently, firms respond by adjusting board composition. Our results are not driven by proxy advisors’ rationales or direct engagement. Instead, voting rationales emerge as a unique communication tool, enabling firms to address investors’ specific concerns. Results suggest that institutional investors’ attention to voting decisions is more widespread than previously documented.

Media coverage: Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance - The Island

When the Examiner Knocks: Banks’ Strategic Provisioning Around CRA Exams

 (with Luciana Orozco)

R&R Management Science

Do scheduled supervisory examinations shape banks’ reporting decisions? We examine this question in the context of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which encourages U.S. banks to serve low- and moderate-income communities. Federal agencies conduct CRA exams periodically, creating predictable windows of scrutiny that allow banks to strategically manage reporting. We find that banks increase loan loss provisions in the quarters leading up to exams and reverse them afterward, consistent with strategic accrual management to influence evaluation outcomes. This behavior is concentrated among underperforming banks relative to peers and those operating in CRA-eligible or high-minority areas. In contrast, it is limited to publicly traded banks and those with low regulatory capital, where market discipline and prudential constraints dominate. Importantly, pre-exam provisioning reduces the likelihood of unfavorable ratings, showing that accounting discretion can materially alter regulatory outcomes. Overall, our findings highlight how the timing and objectives of oversight affect managerial reporting choices and reveal an unintended consequence of stakeholder-oriented regulation.

The bright side of stock repurchases 

(Job Market Paper)

I provide evidence of actual stock repurchases increasing future investment in firms subject to strong asymmetric information that are reliant on external capital markets. To address endogeneity, I use an instrumental variables approach based on price pressures created by mutual funds' liquidity needs. The results are consistent with firms using actual repurchases to signal their type, which eases access to capital markets and ultimately improves real outcomes. 

Media coverage: WSJ Moneybeat - Clearbridge

Do institutional investors care about corporate social responsibility and irresponsibility?* 

 (with Antonio B. Vazquez)

This paper investigates how Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Corporate Social Irresponsibility (CSiR) change when the degree of monitoring by institutional investors varies. We exploit changes in institutional investor distraction due to extreme events in unrelated industries, which is a plausible exogenous source of variation in monitoring intensity. We show that tighter monitoring reduces both CSR and CSiR. The impact on the former is mainly found in contexts prone to agency conflicts, while the effect on the latter is concentrated in settings where there is a demand for advising. Our results are robust to alternative definitions of monitoring intensity and CSR.

*Available upon request